Corsair Raptor K40 Gaming Keyboard Review

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Raptor K40 Detailed Features

The keyboard’s internal LED lighting uses full RGB LEDs, giving you a choice of over 16 million colors. Blue, red, and yellow are just a few pre-defined choices Corsair provides. The color choice applies to the entire keyboard. You can also specify that the keyboard “pulse” (slowly changing the brightness from off to full and back) and cycle (rotate through colors). There are three levels of intensity, plus off.

Opening the keyboard reveals a standard rubber-dome contact sheet. The domes provide both the spring return as well as the electrical contact when pressed. Although they’re not as durable or “crisp” as mechanical key switches, rubber dome switches have the advantage of being completely silent.

Ten RGB LEDs along the bottom of the keyboard use light pipes and plastic diffuser grids to spread the light to each key.

The light exits upwards through the clear plastic dome switch layer and the clear legends molded into each key. Since the light from just a few LEDs must illuminate the entire keyboard, the keys aren’t as brightly lit as keys with individual LEDs. The lighting is clearly visible in bright room lighting when set to the highest of its three levels, but will show best in a dimmer environment.

Although the keyboard is constructed entirely of plastic and is very lightweight, I found it to be exceptionally rigid, much more so than generic rubber-dome keyboards. Aside from the design and shape of the plastic parts, these 17 screws clamping the parts together probably helped. This gives the keyboard a higher quality feel than you might expect.

The label on the back of the keyboard shows the USB input rating at 500mA. This is the full power allotted to a standard USB port, and the keyboard probably needs it for the backlighting and internal electronics. It probably won’t work right if you plug it into an unpowered USB hub.

There’s no real documentation or software included with the keyboard, as is all too common these days. You’ll need to visit the Corsair web site to download the keyboard software, and the multi-language leaflet’s description of the software features might politely be described as “cursory”.

So much for the physical aspects of the keyboard. Let’s get to the software.